Bilingual Insights into the Initial Lexicon

The Role of Cognates in Word Acquisition

Gonzalo Garcia-Castro

PhD Defence / Departament de Medicina i Ciències de la Vida

2024-11-03

Average English-native 20-year-old knows ~42,000 words: mental lexicon

Lexical representations: Phonological, conceptual, grammatical information of known words

Overview

Introduction:
From speech sounds to words
Bilingualism and its challenges
The role of phonology (cognateness)
Study 1: AMBLA model, acquisition of cognates, role of language exposure
Study 2: language non-selectivity in the initial bilingual lexicon
Discussion

In the last five years, we have explored the initial lexicon through the lens of a particular case of language learning: bilingual infants
In this presentation, I will first provide an overview of how words become relevant linguistic units to infants
Second, I will elaborate on the specific challenges that bilinguals face in their vocabulary acquisition journey. In particular, how bilinguals manage to keep up with monolinguals in their vocabulary acquisition trajectories, despite facing a more complex linguistic environment.
Third, I will describe some recent insights into how phonology (and in particular, the lexical similarity between the two languages), and on some unresolved issues that we have addressed in the present dissertation
Fourth, I will formally present a model that proposes a candidate mechanism to explain how cognateness boosts lexical acquisition in bilinguals
I will then present the first empirical study of the dissertation, in which we generate and test the central predictions of the model
In the second empirical study, we test one of the central assumption of the model
Finally, I summarise the main insights of our work, and discuss its implications for current understanding of the initial bilingual lexicon, limitations, and future steps.

The initial lexicon

From sounds to lexical representations
Vocabulary spurt
Early dynamics of lexical processing

From sounds to lexical representations

Lexical representation: (at least) form-meaning association

Inter-modal paradigms

(Bergelson and Swingley 2012, 2015; Tincoff and Jusczyk 1999, 2012)

Parental reports

e.g., MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) (Fenson et al. 1994)

Vocabulary growth

Vocabulary size grows non-linearly during the second year of life

Figure 1: Vocabulary size norms for 51,800 monolingual children learning 35 distinct languages (wordbank)

Early dynamics of lexical processing

Cascaded activation: activation spreads across non-selected lexical representations (Allopenna, Magnuson, and Tanenhaus 1998)

Early dynamics of lexical processing

In children (Chow, Davies, and Plunkett 2017)

Semantic priming (Styles and Plunkett 2009)
Phonological priming (Avila-Varela, Arias-Trejo, and Mani 2021; Mani and Plunkett 2010)

The bilingual lexicon

Challenges a bilingual environment

Bilingual words acquisition

Cognateness

Language non-selectivity

Challenges a bilingual environment

Increased complexity in linguistic context:

Two grammatical systems, two phoneme inventories, two sets of word-forms

Reduced linguistic input

Split into two languages

Increased referential ambiguity

2 labels, 1 referent

Bilingual word acquisition

Bilinguals acquire words at similar rates as monolinguals (Hoff et al. 2012)

A cognate facilitation in lexical acquisition?

Lexically closer languages ➡️ Larger vocabulary size (Floccia et al. 2018)

English-Dutch > English-Mandarin

Cognate: form-similar translation equivalents (TEs)

Cognate	Non-cognate
[cat] /ˈgat-ˈgato/	[dog] /ˈgos-ˈpe.ro/

Cognates acquired earlier than non-cognates (Mitchell, Tsui, and Byers-Heinlein 2023; Bosch and Ramon-Casas 2014)

A cognate facilitation in lexical acquisition?

Figure 2: Pairwise lexical similarity

A cognate facilitation in lexical acquisition?

Figure 3: Aggregated vocabularies might conceal facilitation effects

What mechanisms support a cognate facilitation during word acquisition?

Language non-selective lexical access

Language non-selectivity

Activation spreads across non-selected representations in both languages, through phonological and conceptual links. (e.g., Costa, Caramazza, and Sebastian-Galles 2000)

Language non-selectiviy

Study 1

Cognate beginnings to lexical acquisition

Introduction

Bilinguals keep up with monolinguals in vocabulary growth

The presence of cognates seems to facilitate vocabulary acquisition

Language co-activation has been suggested to underlie this phenomenon

What mechanisms are support the role of co-activation in cognate acquisition?

The AMBLA model

Accumulator Model of Bilingual Lexical Acquisition

Infants accumulate information about word-forms until a threshold is reached and the word is acquired

Information is provided in the form of word effective learning instances (ELI).

Effective learning instance: Exposure to a word-form that results in the accumulation of information about its meaning

\[ \begin{aligned} \textbf{For participant } &i \textbf{ and word-form } j \text{ (translation of } j'): \\ \text{Age of Acquisition}_{ij} &= \{\text{Age}_i \mid \text{Learning instances}_{ij} = c\}\\ \text{Learning instances}_{ij} &= \text{Age}_i \cdot \text{Freq}_j \cdot \color{IBMMagenta}{\text{Exposure}_{ij}} \\ \textbf{where:} \\ \text{Freq}_j &\sim \text{Poisson}(\lambda = 50) \\ c &= 300 \\ \end{aligned} \]

Words accumulate additional information from the co-activation of their (phonologically similar) translation equivalent

Learning instances for one word-form may result in the accumulation of information for its translation equivalent

Degree of income additional information proportional to the phonological similarity between both translation equivalents

\[ \begin{aligned} \textbf{For participant } &i \textbf{ and word-form } j \text{ (translation of } j'): \\ \text{Age of Acquisition}_{ij} &= \{\text{Age}_i \mid \text{Learning instances}_{ij} = c\}\\ \text{Learning instances}_{ij} &= \text{Age}_i \cdot \text{Freq}_j \cdot \color{IBMMagenta}{\text{Exposure}_{ij}} \cdot \color{IBMMagenta}{\text{Cognateness}_{j}}\\ \textbf{where:} \\ \text{Frequency}_j &\sim \text{Poisson}(\lambda = 50) \\ c &= 300 \\ \color{IBMMagenta}{\text{Cognateness}_{j}} = &\color{IBMMagenta}{\text{Levenshtein}(j, j')} \end{aligned} \\ \]

Methods

Barcelona Vocabulary Questionnaire (BVQ)

Participants

Data processing

Modelling approach and statistical inference

Results

Regression coefficients

Figure 4: Posterior distribution of fixed regression coefficients

Marginal effects

Figure 5: Posterior marginal effects

Discussion

Study 2

Developmental trajectories of bilingual spoken word recognition

Introduction

Methods

Participants

Stimuli

Design

Procedure

Results

Discussion

Thanks

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Avila-Varela, Daniela S, Natalia Arias-Trejo, and Nivedita Mani. 2021. “A Longitudinal Study of the Role of Vocabulary Size in Priming Effects in Early Childhood.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 205: 105071. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2020.105071.

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